FundamentallySound Blog

One thing I notice living in San Francisco is that there are so many people with severe disabilities apparently living out on the streets. Everywhere. Just walking down a block from my apartment, I confront at least two people in wheelchairs panhandling while talking to themselves and someone else with a severe limp holding a conversation with a garbage can, his wild hair and blank store give the look of a war veteran. I don't know how I have learned to make this connection between a certain crazed look and someone having seen war firsthand. It's probably from noticing so many people with those cardboard signs that say "Homeless Veteran, Please Help" and extrapolating that anyone with wild eyes like that must be a former soldier.

And I have often thought that this surplus of severely disabled street people is largely due to the nearly nonstop armed conflict the United States has been involved in since the Korean war, producing a huge underclass of mentally fragile and physically disabled people, mostly men, with little or no money, living a nearly homeless life, struggling to get over the brutality they've inflicted and received in combat.

But at a dinner party we had with David and Adrienne the other night, it was proposed that there are not, in fact, more homeless and disabled people in San Francisco. It is simply that they are less inhibited to be in public here. With the constantly warm and sunny weather, a public infrastructure designed to accommodate wheelchairs and the disabled in general, and civic government disinclined to make an effort in reducing the number of street people (this is definitely not Giuliani-era New York) the result is a robust culture of the disabled with plenty of time on their hands and the desire to see and be seen amongst their peers. Much like the muscle boys promenade through the Castro, the mentally challenged parade through the streets of the Tenderloin, fanning out into packs inhabiting neighborhoods all the way out to Golden Gate Park.

It was also pointed out how, in fact, it may be very good for those of us who have a better grasp on reality, more money, and four limbs to be confronted by people living these difficult lives. It's good to be shown that there are wildly divergent interpretations of reality, and to see how suffering is a common characteristic of life as a human. And in essence I agree, but at the same time, formulations such as these allow for an avoidance of the underlying sickness of American culture. We, as a culture, are fundamentally Darwinian, with little time nor inclination to think about those who are less fortunate. In other developed countries, the care needed for the disabled is a function of national government, relieving the populace from guilt and worry. But here, in something approaching for better and worse a more brutally literal democracy, collective good will functions only as much as the base lowest common denominator allows. Which is not so much. So we are stuck with few services other than local charity to improve the lives of those in the worst situations. The bitter consolation is that we get an education in the fragility of life from facing such desperate living on a daily basis.